Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

To celebrate the end of this year, please find below a message from our Principal Investigator, Didier Barret, and our Project Manager, Vincent Albouys:

Dear colleagues and friends,

Here is the time again to wrap up another year of the life of our beautiful X-IFU project. 2019 was clearly very important for X-IFU, after the successful Instrument Preliminary Requirement Review in April and the successful Athena Mission Formulation Review earlier in November. Athena is now on a safe path towards mission adoption. It was only one year ago that the X-IFU consortium was formally appointed by ESA, and its organization also successfully passed through those two reviews.

As we are cruising into phase B, priorities are also set for ramping up the technology demonstration activities (e.g. the Detector Cooling System), consolidating the interfaces of the X-IFU with the science instrument module, freezing the instrument performance requirements. All of this is required for the writing of the red book in support of the mission adoption, scheduled for November 2021, prior to which the Instrument System Requirement Review is expected to take place at the beginning of 2021.

And of course, in 2020, we shall all embark on a mission to reduce the carbon footprint of X-IFU related activities by at least a factor of 2, with a goal of reducing it by 4.

So, may 2020 be as successful as was 2019.

On behalf of the X-IFU Consortium, we wish you happy holidays and a happy New Year!